Comedy cheat #4: Is or isn't it ironic?

In this continuing collection of comedy moments that stuck with me long after I first chuckled at them, I have a gem from the nineties. This one has been much on my mind lately.

We're helping younger daughter prepare for her English exam, which involves, among many other things, defining "irony" and "dramatic irony". Let's not get into how to explain an abstract concept to someone who sees life in concrete terms. Let's just say that dramatic irony is pretty easy to define; irony, not so much.

It is coincidental (but not ironic) that seventeen years ago when this same daughter was a very young baby, Alanis Morisette was having a pretty big hit with the song "Ironic". This ditty was inescapable in 1996. If you did manage to escape it, here's the song, featuring Alanis and her three doubles who are presumably imaginary and therefore don't require seat belts:Now, I'm not crazy about Alanis; I don't mind her, but there's only so much New Age jargon I can take at a sitting:
♫I am aware, nooooowwwww.....♪
Oh dear.

However, her earnestness seemed to make her one hell of a target. One of the wittier sharp-shooters was Irish comedian Ed Byrne who gained a fair bit if notoriety for this routine shortly after Alanis Morisette moved up the charts:
 
Gawd, how old was he, twelve? Now, as much as I guffawed when I first saw this (and it still makes me giggle), I have a couple of reservations: For one thing, Mr Byrne scoffs, "It's not a difficult concept, Alanis!" I beg to differ, Ed. Just try reading this item, then if you can stomach it, some of the hundreds of comments which follow. Or google "irony". Go on, I dare ya.

For another, Ed Byrne declares, as many have since, that the only ironic thing about "Ironic" is that there are no actual examples of irony in it. I draw your attention to the verse about the fellow who was afraid to fly and as his plane crashed down, he thought, "Well, isn't this nice?" I believe what you have there is a case of verbal irony. Don't you think?

Now, that same year, the alternative rock group Pulp was touring in Canada, and stopped by the studios of the music video station MuchMusic in Toronto. (This was back when MuchMusic was still a useful source for hearing many genres of music.) It was the long-standing tradition to play a video request for visiting acts. Jarvis Cocker was evidently aware that MuchMusic had an agreement with Alanis Morissette to not play any of her pre-Jagged-Little-Pill videos -- she had started out as a teen-television-personality who had branched into a brief period of being a pop princess, rather like early Kylie Minogue, or Billie Piper, or Miley Cyrus. Since much of MuchMusic was broadcast live, Cocker seized his chance. It's in the last thirty seconds of the following:
There may have been just a hint of irony in the request.
Don't you think?
And yes, they did play an early Alanis video for him.

The luxury of boredom

 Tomorrow, I'm planning what I hope will be a series of "Hit-the-Ground-Running Days".  Younger daughter finishes classes this Thursday, with an exam on Friday, a recital on Sunday, and a school play on Tuesday.  The following week, we depart for our annual retreat to Victoria, and an acquaintance will be sleeping over in early August to care for the Accent Snob which means I've got to do something about this house. So this is a fine month for NaBloPoMo.  But I already knew that.  It's been worse.

As a place-holder for the actual post on which I'm working, I offer this from the group Jets Overhead from Victoria, mainly because it smacks of my teenage summer memories of the same.  I was never that pretty or popular, but I do remember peasant blouses and cut-offs as well as being young enough to afford the luxury of boredom, which requires much more time than I'll ever have again.  The houses here are rather more suburban and up-scale than my haunts; however, the scenery is very familiar and typical of Vancouver Island.  The song is quite listenable too:

The craft of the father

It's Fathers' Day and the obituaries are full of in memoriams, and Facebook is plastered with father/child pictures. I've made the apple pie, so I take a long walk between rainstorms while elder daughter prepares the rest of the meal as a Father's Day gift. The Accent Snobs performs canine arabesques, and I meditate on the nature of fatherhood.

Which is damn presumptuous of me, when you think about it. In the shelves in the study is a book I haven't read for a very long time: You Just Don't Understand by linguist Deborah Tannen. Her premise, as far as I can recall, was that every marriage -- every heterosexual marriage, that is -- is an intercultural marriage. So I wonder if I, as a woman brought up in the culture of women, dare comment on the man's role of father over in the foreign country of men.

Yet, I have been fathered. (And he wasn't a bad father, when he was sober. And present.) I've helped create a father by giving birth to my daughters, and watched as he re-created himself in the role, as the respective complexities of our children emerged like the butterfly out of the chrysalis. I consider the other complicated father-and-child combinations that I've either descended from or have witnessed: Demeter's stormy relationship with her strict and rather domineering father (my grandfather), and the Resident Fan Boy's father with his lugubrious Edwardian sentimentality mixed with equally Edwardian prejudices. When my maternal grandfather died unexpectedly at the age of 67 (which seemed ancient to me, then ten), my mother came home white with shock, having received the telegram at work. The Resident Fan Boy still grieves his father, now fourteen years gone.

I guess what we three former children -- my mother, my husband, and I -- have in common is the knowledge that we were loved, no matter how imperfectly, and that knowledge makes up for a mountain of mistakes. No matter how many missteps the Resident Fan Boy has taken with his daughters, they can have no doubt of his utter and helpless devotion to them. It's a double-edged sword, but hey -- nobody said this was easy.

I make my way home, pausing to watch a Pileated Woodpecker, his tail-feathers hanging like a morning coat, edging his way up the long trunk of a birch tree by the Rideau River. Elder daughter has prepared salmon with a dill sauce with three cheeses in it. The Resident Fan Boy watches his girls leave the table at the close of the meal.

"I feel cherished," he says quietly. Later, I add two photos to my Facebook page: my favourite pictures of him with each of our daughters.

The woman with the caterpillar eyes

It was probably almost exactly thirteen years ago on a slightly overcast Saturday during our last June in Victoria. The Resident Fan Boy was home for a weekend secondment, having gone ahead to begin his new permanent job in Hades. I remained behind, getting elder daughter through her final days of Grade Two, and frantically cleaning between viewings from prospective home-buyers during which I had to hustle younger daughter into a stroller and vacate the house. We hadn't seen the Resident Fan Boy for about a month and would not see him again for another five weeks when he would come back to escort us to our new province and city.

I was overtaxed; he was jet-lagged. That's probably why we thought taking the girls to the Oak Bay Tea Party with the accompanying midway at Willow Beach would be a good idea.

It wasn't so bad at first. The RFB took elder daughter on the rides. Younger daughter was too small to join her sister. Besides, for the past year she had developed a habit of melting down in anything involving crowds. I thought it had something to do with her father's frequent absences -- she had started having night terrors early on in his first secondment nearly two years before -- but I had made an appointment for later in the month to have her assessed by a speech pathologist.

I knew I had to get younger daughter to a washroom before setting off on the long bus-ride home, so I set up a rendezvous point with the RFB and elder daughter, and led younger daughter to the pavilion. I don't quite remember when she started screaming. Maybe it was the long line-up, maybe it was not knowing where her father and sister had gone, but by the time I got her into a cubicle, she was yelling blue murder. I tried to soothe her, but I knew there was a point when she was beyond my reach and I could only wait for her to subside. Somehow, we got through the business, and I beat a hasty and embarrassed retreat, aware of the many eyes on us and that the RFB and elder daughter must be wondering what on earth had become of us.

A woman stepped into our path.

"Why is she asking to be left alone?"

"Because she's had enough of here and she needs space," I replied wearily, scanning the crowd for an opening, but this woman was not budging. She was standing very close to me and what I chiefly remember about her was that she had blond hair (standard for Oak Bay) and dark-green eye-liner with one odd little hump on each side, like two little caterpillars.

"Well, I'm a mother and I'm concerned."

I couldn't believe my ears. "So am I!"

"I have three children and none of them ever behaved like this!"

"Well, good for you, lady," I called back, quickly steering younger daughter, who had calmed down quite a bit by this time, into an available gap in the milling bodies.

I wonder if Caterpillar Woman thinks back on this incident at all. If she does, it's no doubt with some self-satisfaction in confronting an evident child abuser. When I remember her -- and I try not to -- I think of her three children who never "behaved like this". I hope they saved all their acting-out for adolescence and made life a perfect hell for their perfect mother.

How to lose friends in ten clicks or less

I'm old enough to be floored by how little time it takes to answer a question with the ubiquitous assistance of the internet.  Remember having to wait until the library opened?  Or poring through books for that one quote you couldn't quite remember?  Or lying awake at night because you couldn't remember who sang that song about --- was it pina coladas or bean enchiladas?

Just me, then?

Oh well,  now I can solve petty arguments with a few well-aimed clicks. I figure it's good fodder for the only book I can ever see myself writing:  How to Lose Friends and Really P*** People Off.  (I have an uneasy feeling that someone's already made off with that title.  I should google it.)

Look, I love my Facebook pals.  They're intelligent, kind, and competent people. However it seems the vast majority of them will pass on urban legends masquerading as fact, uplifting essays attributed to the wrong person, and those blobs of purple prose emotional blackmail that tell me if I love my family, or care about people with cancer, or am against bullying, then I will press the Share button.  Sometimes, it's a spectacular combination of all three, as when I pretty damn near succeeded in permanently alienating my best friend from high school a couple of months ago.

I've discussed the wisdom of waiting three days before correcting anybody on the Internet.  Too bad I ignore my own advice. In my own (weak) defense,  I think it was the shock of receiving this thing from a person I know to be sweet, gentle, and generous.  Credited to Bill Cosby, it was a diatribe against people collecting welfare, Islam, and global warning  -- which no one is allowed to debate.  I think what really blew my top was the charming little postscript:  If you don't forward this, you are part of the problem.

Boom. I put this link in the comments field below her Facebook post, but couldn't resist adding (bad move, Persephone -- best just to post the link) that not only had Bill Cosby not written it, but he had published a comment saying that he doesn't subscribe to the ugly views expressed in the email.  She wrote back, gently protesting that there were some "interesting thoughts" in the essay.  I shot back (another bad idea) that thinking had nothing to do with it, she had just pressed "Share", that my daughters attended school with Muslim children, and were the Muslims she knew like those described in the article? (I am reasonably certain she doesn't know any.) That's when she took the post down.  We didn't really communicate for a few weeks, but she's "liking" my family news again, so maybe we're all right...

Elder daughter rolls her eyes whenever she hears of my latest computer confrontation.  Only today she admonished me on Facebook:  "Stop myth-busting me!"

I'd questioned a posting she'd shared regarding the Progressive Conservative Party's plan to eliminate public spending on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation  -- which is an odd position to take on a public broadcaster.  It turns out that the posting was accurate; elder daughter sent a link from the Conservatives' upcoming convention agenda along with her admonition: . . . the objective being the order by elimination of all public funding of the corporation which creates unfair competitive advantage with privately owned and operated networks and stations. (Hunh? It seems to me that when you apply business principles to public institutions, you end up at the lowest common denominator.  We have enough broadcasters trolling in the mud, thank you very much; it seems the most successful business model is reality TV and celebrity gossip.)

Am I wrong to challenge friends and family?  I certainly learn much more for myself when I "myth-bust".  Is it politer to keep what I learn to myself, and let them happily post the questionable stuff without question? Is that what a friend does?

Comedy cheat #3: feeling guilty about laughing at Sam Kinison

In the continuing series of comedy moments that have stuck with me:

So it was the mid-eighties and it seemed that everything was Band Aid, Live Aid, and CBC footage of skeletal children in Ethiopia. It was heart-rending.

Maybe that's why I laughed until I hurt when I saw this routine by Sam Kinison who never really was my kind of comedian.  However, the warped logic of this is diabolically irresistible:
I'm not proud of myself for finding this funny. But I did.  And a twisted part of me still does.

Playing for time by playing a video

Look, I've been writing up a post, but it's not finished and I'm wiped.  Here's a song I liked not long after younger daughter was born.  It may even have been in June.

"Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand" - Primitive Radio Gods

Comedy cheat #2: "They know they're next."

As I've said, for this NaBloPoMo, I've set aside a few moments of comedy that have stuck with me.  They correspond roughly to one per decade - last week represented the sixties; this week's is from the seventies, although I can't remember when I saw it for the first time.  It has a dark side to it and has haunted me for years.

Freddy Prinze, like many comedians,  had his own dark side.  He was the star of a sit-com called Chico and the Man.  Although I don't recall ever sitting through an episode, the familiar catch-phrase was "It's not my job!".  (Rather like "How you doin'?" from Friends.  I bet you can think up a dozen more.)  At the time of this particular stand-up routine, he was about twenty years old.  He was dead three years later, of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

This routine, which is funny without relying on the shock-value of profanity, seems light-hearted, but there is one rather sinister sentence keeps returning to me:  Chinese don't want Puerto Ricans to make it 'cause they know they're next.

I remembered Freddie Prinze when I first heard the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  It's said that as the buildings burned and flaming resistance fighters leapt from the windows, Polish citizens were heard to hoot and call:  "There goes another one!"  Yet, in the Nazi hierarchy of hatred, Poles were only one rung up from the Jews. It's true that the Nazis were cynically using the long and distinguished history of anti-Semitism in Poland to their own ends, but I think what it really boiled down to was that the Poles knew they were next.

I began to wonder if it's the nature of oppression itself that turns oppressed people against each other, rather than uniting them against the oppressor.  I think about this every time I see women tearing into each other over issues that should be matters of personal choice.  Is it because we're afraid we're next?

Time to lighten up.  Here's the original monologue with that little bit of shadow which still makes me laugh, but a tad uneasily:
 

Lost in translation

I'm trying to remember the last time I had a really pleasant dream.  The only dreams I have these days are ones in which I'm failing to do something.  Failing to care for my children properly (they are usually much younger and I'm left them somewhere), or failing to prepare (I'm teaching without a lesson plan or have that old chestnut about trying to find the examination room for a course I've neglected to attend all year).

Then there's my real life where my dreams come true.  Not in Hollywood style. Younger daughter has summatives due.  For you non-Ontarians, those are the term end class projects and reports due at the end of the semester, in January and June.  Younger daughter being autistic with big-time memory issues, this means heavy parental involvement, mainly to understand what is required so we can help her get the task in manageable pieces.  And don't get me started on exams. I fail (there's that word again) to see how exams benefit anyone, much less someone who often can't quite remember what has happened during the day.

I dash out into the mildly muggy evening because there's yet another deadline I'm not meeting:  getting the Accent Snob out for his walk before the rain gets earnest.  It's still just spitting when I spot a lady in a beautiful tunic with a kind of paisley design down the centre.
"What a beautiful top!" I exclaim.
She shrugs helplessly. "I'm afraid I don't speak English.  Just French."
I rein the dog in, thinking, For Pete's sake, I should be able to manage this.  But the words seem to skid away like scraps of paper in a wind.  This is what younger daughter's life is every day.
"Uh, blouson?" I stammer.  She is kind enough to nod.  "C'est très belle..."
"Merci," she smiles, probably figuring I'll understand that much.

It's spitting a bit more now.  Chemise? I'm thinking.  And a "blouson" would be "beau" anyway, wouldn't it?

The Accent Snob finally accomplishes what we've set out for and my blouson/chemise is only slightly spotted with raindrops when we return.

The reason I've failed to get out earlier is that a) we're ploughing ahead with bite-sized piece of exam review while plotting how to approach the teacher diplomatically; and b)  I've been showing younger daughter some of what she missed of last night's Tonys, and re-showing the Resident Fan Boy the big opening number which was so big, so fast, and so breath-taking that it requires several re-viewings just to get all the jokes.

Evil comes in increments

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had to wait about seven months in the library holds queue for this, and when I finally got my sticky fingers on it (which I wiped off, because it was a library loan), I was at first anxious because this audiobook version has a different reader and part of the reason I'd enjoyed Wolf Hall so much was because of the performance of Simon Slater.  I needn't have worried; Simon Vance is every bit as talented as the other Simon.

This second part of the trilogy about the controversial life and career of Thomas Cromwell covers a much shorter period of time than Wolf Hall -- the brief period that Anne Boleyn was the official consort of Henry VIII -- while being about the same number of pages.  I trust you know what happened to her. This has the effect of intensifying the narrative.

I was looking forward to discovering how Hilary Mantel, who portrayed Thomas Cromwell in a sympathetic light in the previous book (the story is from his viewpoint, after all) would transform this chief minister of the king from a fairly decent man into someone who could send a woman to the scaffold, knowing full well that the charges against her were fabricated.  Anne Boleyn is not shown in a flattering light, but being a bit of a cow shouldn't be a death sentence. The answer comes in increments, as most evil things do.  In Bring Up the Bodies (a sinister title, but actually a legal expression), Cromwell has no grand plan to bring about Anne's death, but one unfortunate statement after another gradually seals the queen's fate.

I particularly enjoyed the imagery in this novel, from the eerie descriptions of Cromwell's hunting hawks (named after his dead wife and daughters) which open this part of the story to the description of the doomed queen's reflection in the Thames as she is led out to the boat that will take her to the Tower of London.

It will be a long wait for the third part of the trilogy -- Mantel is still writing it, and then there will be many holds ahead of me at the library.  Judging from what has come before, the wait will be worth it.



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